Bug Labs Announces New Open Source Hardware

Posted on January 21, 2009
Filed Under Emerging Technology | Leave a Comment

Open Source Hardware

Bug Labs, a San Francisco-based developer of open-source platform for DIY gadgets, announces new modules:

Bug Labs is experimenting with a new business model, enabling hardware developers to build applications within short time on a tight budget.

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Switching to Ubuntu Desktop

Posted on December 15, 2008
Filed Under Trends | Leave a Comment

My old PC has suffered a series of hiccups caused apparently by some Windows XP conflicts and finally died in my hands. I had either to buy a new desktop or try to re-install Windows and all programs. Instead I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.10.

The installation is pretty straightforward and fast. It takes about 30 min and includes all packages that come with Ubuntu, like Open Office, Mozilla Firefox, etc. A first pleasant surprise was understanding that I don’t have to install any drivers for cable modem, printer and scanner. Ubuntu has all drivers built-in. Ubuntu detects all hardware automatically.

Old habits die hard, it was somewhat a hassle to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office. I use Gimp for image editing and Scribus for desktop publishing. If you badly need some MS Windows program, there is a fair chance that it will run under Wine emulation package. Nice feature of Open Office programs is built-in export to pdf.

In feature-by-feature scoring MS Windows will outrun Ubuntu but for home office or small business Ubuntu is definitely a viable choice with many merits. It just requires some determination to switch and learn the ropes.

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Mobile photo-sharing site raises $5 million

Posted on December 11, 2008
Filed Under Venture News | 6 Comments

SnapMyLife, a mobile photo-sharing site, has raised a new $5 million round of funding, led by current investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures. SnapMyLife is subsidiary of Mobicious, Inc. George Grey, founder and CEO of SnapMyLife, says that SnapMyLife addresses three billion mobile phone owners worldwide capturing and sharing digital photos taken by their mobiles.

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Enterprise-Level SaaS Collaborative Software Development Platform

Posted on December 11, 2008
Filed Under Venture Capital, Venture News | Leave a Comment

A company called CVSDude (based in California and Queensland Australia) provides an innovative service enabling disparate programming teams to collaborate and develop revision-controlled software. If you know about programming tools like Subversion and CVS - CVSDude has them available in a fault-tolerant, SaaS (Softwae as a Service) platform.

Their software development platform is available via the browser on Windows, OS X , Linux and Solaris. More than 60,000 users in 66+ countries worldwide use CVSDude every day to effectively collaborate, manage and deploy the world’s most complex open-source and commercial software applications.

In business since 2002, the company recently closed some early pre-Series A funding and have just announced the first customer for their upcoming Enterprise-level product.

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Ad Campaign Analysis: Boston Matrix Adaptation

Posted on November 17, 2008
Filed Under Online Tools | Leave a Comment

When running a lot of Google ad campaigns I use the following approach to decide which campaigns to run and which to drop.

The first stage is gathering ad statistics and sales conversion evidence while disregarding advertising costs. That gives me a measure of sales elasticity of ad exposure. In other words, more ads mean more sales mean high elasticity. If the ad campaigns are inelastic, they should be dropped in most cases.

Here comes the second stage. If ad campaigns are elastic, but non-profitable than you can try to improve profitability by fine tuning ad campaign or raising product price (if possible). Below is Boston matrix adapted for our case and covering four possible outcomes.


Fig. 1 Balancing Ad Campaigns (Elasticity-Profitability Matrix)
Ad Campaign Analysis: Boston Matrix Adaptation

Tracking sales conversion might be tricky. In the lack of hard sales conversion evidence the number of enquiries, emails or phone calls is a good secondary indicator of ad campaign elasticity.

Let us assume that our case is somewhere in Question Mark area. This is actually gambling – will ad-driven sales cover advertising costs or not? Do we need this?

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